Dr. Jonathan Fram, project manager for the Endurance Array, is quoted in this Eos article about the potential implications of the cancellation of the spring cruise to recover and redeploy equipment at the Endurance Array:

With research cruises postponed, scientists are trying to get home safe, and others worry about the fate of their instruments left at sea.

By Jessica DuncombeOceanographer Rainer Lohmann from the University of Rhode Island was on a research cruise near Barbados when the coronavirus spread rapidly into a pandemic.“When we left, everything was normal,” Lohmann said, speaking by phone while his ship, the R/V Endeavor, waited to dock in the city of Praia in Cape Verde on 17 March. “Now what we’re hearing and seeing is that we’re coming back to a country where we have to fight for toilet paper, where there are no hand sanitizers left, and you can’t go out to restaurants.”The Endeavor left the Caribbean island of Barbados in late February and set off toward Cape Verde near West Africa, collecting sediment cores as it went. Lohmann and his team were investigating whether ocean sediments thousands of meters below the surface contained traces of atmospheric black carbon. After traversing much of the Atlantic Ocean, they had all the samples they needed and planned to fly home via Europe in mid-March.But they faced a problem: The United States had just imposed strict travel restrictions through Europe. They needed a new way home.

From sharks to ice shelves, monsoons to volcanoes, the scope of ocean monitoring is widening.

IN NOVEMBER 2016 a large crack appeared in the Larsen C ice shelf off Antarctica (pictured). By July 2017 a chunk a quarter of the size of Wales, weighing one trillion tonnes, broke off from the main body of the shelf and started drifting away into the Southern Ocean. The shelf is already floating, so even such a large iceberg detaching itself did not affect sea levels. But Larsen C buttresses a much larger mass of ice that sits upon the Antarctic continent. If it breaks up completely, as its two smaller siblings (Larsens A and B) have done over the past 20 years, that ice on shore could flow much more easily into the ocean. If it did so—and scientists believe it would—that ice alone could account for 10cm of sea-level rise, more than half of the total rise seen in the 20th century.

The dynamics of the process, known as calving, that causes a shelf to break up are obscure. That, however, may soon change. Ocean Infinity, a marine-survey firm based in Texas, is due to send two autonomous drones under the Larsen C shelf in 2019, the first subglacial survey of its kind. “It is probably the least accessible and least explored area on the globe,” says Julian Dowdeswell, a glaciologist at the University of Cambridge who will lead the scientific side of the project.

The drones set to explore Larsen C look like 6-metre orange cigars and are made by Kongsberg—the same Norwegian firm that runs the new open-ocean fish farms. Called Hugin, after one of the ravens who flew around the world gathering information for Odin, a Norse god, the drones are designed to cruise precisely planned routes to investigate specific objects people already know about, such as oil pipelines, or to find things that they care about, such as missing planes. With lithium-ion-battery systems about as big as those found in a Tesla saloon the drones can travel at four knots for 60 hours on a charge, which gives them a range of about 400km. Their sensors will measure how the temperature of the water varies. Their sonar—which in this case, unusually, looks upwards—will measure the roughness of the bottom of the ice. Both variables are crucial in assessing how fast the ice shelf is breaking up, says Dr Dowdeswell.

The ability to see bits of the ocean, and things which it contains, that were previously invisible does not just matter to miners and submariners. It matters to scientists, environmentalists and fisheries managers. It helps them understand the changing Earth, predict the weather—including its dangerous extremes—and maintain fish stocks and protect other wildlife. Drones of all shapes and sizes are hoping to provide far more such information than has ever been available before.

….

That’s why it’s hotter under the water

To this end Amala Mahadevan of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) in Massachusetts, has been working with the Indian weather agencies to install a string of sensors hanging down off a buoy in the northern end of the Bay of Bengal.

A large bank of similar buoys called the Pioneer Array has been showing oceanographers things they have not seen before in the two years it has been operating off the coast of New England. The array is part of the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) funded by America’s National Science Foundation. It is providing a three-dimensional picture of changes to the Gulf Stream, which is pushing as much as 100km closer to the shore than it used to. “Fishermen are catching Gulf Stream fish 100km in from the continental shelf,” says Glen Gawarkiewicz of WHOI. These data make local weather forecasting better.

Three other lines of buoys and floats have recently been installed across the Atlantic in order to understand the transfer of deep water from the North Atlantic southwards, a flow which is fundamental to the dynamics of all the world’s oceans, and which may falter in a warmer climate.

Another part of the OOI is the Cabled Array off the coast of Oregon. Its sensors, which span one of the smallest of the world’s tectonic plates, the Juan de Fuca plate, are connected by 900km of fibre-optic cable and powered by electricity cables that run out from the shore. The array is designed to gather data which will help understand the connections between the plate’s volcanic activity and the biological and oceanographic processes above it.

A set of sensors off Japan takes a much more practical interest in plate tectonics. The Dense Oceanfloor Network System for Earthquakes and Tsunamis (DONET) consists of over 50 sea-floor observing stations, each housing pressure sensors which show whether the sea floor is rising or falling, as well as seismometers which measure the direct movement caused by an earthquake. When the plates shift and the sea floor trembles, they can send signals racing back to shore at the speed of light in glass, beating the slower progress of the seismic waves through the Earth’s crust, to give people a few valuable extra seconds of warning. Better measuring of climate can save lives over decades; prompt measurement of earthquakes can save them in an instant.

A new high-definition camera installed at a hydrothermal vent along the Juan de Fuca Ridge streams live imagery more than 480 kilometers back to shore from a depth of more than 1,500 meters. The vent is named “Mushroom” and is in the caldera of the ridge’s Axial Seamount, located off the Pacific Northwest coast of North America. Two workshops at Rutgers University focused on using ocean observatory data as an undergraduate teaching tool. Credit: NSF-OOI/UW/ISS

OOI Teaching with Data Workshops; New Brunswick, New Jersey, 19–21 May 2017 (chemistry) and 2–4 June 2017 (geology)

The Data Explorations Project hosted two Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Teaching with Data workshops in spring 2017. Community college and university professors interested in increasing their use of observatory data with early undergraduate students came from 10 states to participate. Our team of researchers, science education specialists, and data scientists from Rutgers University and the University of California, Berkeley, hosted this workshop with the goal of providing tools to help professors overcome hurdles to using online data in the classroom. Attendees explored research-based ways to teach with data, pilot tested data-based activities predeveloped by the Data Explorations team, and planned how to integrate these activities into instruction.

The provided interactive activities—Data Explorations—merge oceanographic data from the National Science Foundation’s OOI, data visualization theory, user interface design, and current research on learning. These online student-centered activities elicit student questions, explanations, and discussions of concepts covered in introductory courses and are linked to a highly used textbook (Essentials of Oceanography, 12th edition), enabling easy adoption nationally.

Textbooks often use idealized illustrations to highlight concepts, but the real world rarely matches these idealized patterns. Therefore, workshop attendees explored the use of real-world observation data to enrich students’ understanding of the concepts and to provide supplemental context for understanding the patterns in their textbook diagrams. Such opportunities are important for students who do not have the ability to collect their own data and for looking at data from broader spatial and temporal scales than would be typical of the data that students collect during field trips and laboratory projects. Participants also discussed the challenges of helping students with cognitive transitions between working with idealized and real-world data.

The focus of the workshops was twofold: discuss and experience strategies for teaching with data to support greater understanding of the concepts and explore predeveloped activities using OOI-related data sets. During the workshops, professors took on the role of students to experience firsthand the Data Explorations and to better understand how students would perceive the teaching strategies being demonstrated. Each workshop was bookended with discussions about active learning strategies; how to design active learning experiences (e.g., microlabs, concept maps); and The Learning Cycle, which organizes instruction around what is known about how people learn.

Participants at OOI Teaching with Data Workshops connected with other members of the undergraduate teaching community as they explored ways to integrate online data into their teaching. Credit: Janice McDonnell

Twenty participants across the geology- and chemistry-focused workshops developed implementation plans for the 2017–2018 academic year to meet the needs of their students (e.g., face to face) and their course setup needs (e.g., hybrid) most appropriately. Most professors will integrate these activities as active parts of their lectures or as laboratory exercises. Their feedback will contribute to the further development of effective practices for integrating online data into undergraduate teaching.

Participants expressed positive initial impressions of the activities, saying that the activities will help improve students’ data skills and understanding of associated science concepts. They also reported a substantial increase in their confidence for teaching with online data.

Through the workshops and Data Explorations activities, more undergraduates will be able to use online data in accessible ways. Faculty interested in using these activities can learn more by reading the instructor’s guides on OOI’s Collections page.

The workshops were run by the authors and Catherine Halversen, University of California, Berkeley. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation (grants OCE-1550207, OCE-1649637).

A high-definition camera built by the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory is trained on the 13-foot-tall, actively venting hot spring called Mushroom at the summit of the Axial Seamount, about a mile deep in the Pacific off the Oregon coast. (UW / NSF-OOI / CSSF Photo)

Wave Broadband is coming out in the open about its partnership with the University of Washington to provide broadband connectivity for the Regional Cabled Array, an undersea observatory that’s part of the federally backed Ocean Observatories Initiative.

UW operates and maintains the Regional Cabled Array, which collects a torrent of scientific data from the floor of the Pacific Ocean off the Oregon coast. More than 150 scientific instruments measure seismic activity, fluid flow, chemical composition and other phenomena in areas such as the Southern Hydrate ridge and the Axial Seamount volcano, lying as much as a mile beneath the ocean surface..

Electrical power and data flow 24/7 via a 323-mile-long cable that runs between the instrument array and a shore station in Pacific City, Ore. Keeping up with the real-time data stream requires a network that can handle transport speeds of up to 100 gigabits per second.

That part of the job gets handled by Wave, which is headquartered in Kirkland, Wash.

“We rely heavily on fiber connectivity from Wave Business to not only quickly transfer our data from the Oregon Coast shore station to UW for analysis, but to also, in real time, control and communicate with our underwater instruments to respond to oceanic events,” UW oceanographer Deborah Kelley said in a news release. “Wave is a critical partner to our success.”

Wave’s fiber infrastructure also sends the stream to the Ocean Observatories Initiative’s data portal at Rutgers University in New Jersey, to other data centers and to the rest of the world.

“We’re excited to partner with the UW and the Cabled Array program to empower real-time sharing of the data at the speed of light,” said Patrick Knorr, executive vice president of business solutions at Wave.

This month, Wave announced that it’s expanding gigabit internet service to residential and small-business customers on the West Coast. Wave’s gigabit broadband service was previously available only to large businesses, selected housing developments — and apparently, scientific projects.

Wave is in the middle of being acquired TPG Capital and combining with two other companies — RCN Telecom Services and Grande Communications Networks — to form the nation’s sixth largest internet and cable operator in a $2.36 billion deal.

In the years ahead, researchers at UW and elsewhere expect to use the Regional Cabled Array to gain new insights about the marine effects of climate change, including ocean acidification, and to monitor the flora and fauna in one of the Pacific’s most biologically productive regions.

The data network also keeps a close eye on seismic activity in a part of the Pacific that’s been known to generate strong earthquakes and tsunami waves. In 2015, the cabled array gave scientists their first opportunity to monitor an eruption at the Axial Seamount in real time. More than 8,000 earthquakes were recorded over a 24-hour period, and the undersea volcano’s summit dropped 7 feet.

It’s conceivable that undersea instrument arrays like the Regional Cabled Array could someday pick up the early warning signs for a catastrophic Cascadia mega-earthquake, also known as the “Really Big One,”

Zooplankton, including this Euphausia pacifica, spend their days in deep water and rise to the surface to feed at night. They made an extra trip on Monday because they were fooled by the eclipse. (NOAA)

We humans weren’t the only life-forms to be affected by the Great American Eclipse on Monday.

Tiny marine creatures known as zooplankton got all mixed up as the sunlight grew increasingly dim along the path of totality.

One hour before the sky went dark, the gradual change in light caused the confused little critters to begin swimming up the water column to start their nighttime feeding routine.

As soon as totality was over and the light levels began to return to normal, however, they realized their mistake and made their way back to the safety of deeper, darker waters.

“They didn’t make it all the way up because the eclipse is only so long,” said Jonathan Fram, the Oregon State University oceanographer who observed them. “It takes them a while to get to the surface.”

This plot shows zooplankton (in green) making an extra trip to the ocean surface (in red) during the eclipse. Normally, they come up to feed only at night. (Jonathan Fram / Ocean Observatories Initiative)

To measure the movement of the plankton, Fram used bioacuoustic sonar equipment that is stationed off the Oregon coast.

The sonar equipment is part of a larger suite of instruments deployed by the Ocean Observatories Initiative that allows scientists to measure all kinds of oceanic variables, including water temperature, sunlight and air temperature.

Data collected by these instruments show that, overall, ocean animals do not experience the eclipse the same way we do.

On land, creatures in the path of totality felt the temperature drop several degrees as the moon covered the sun. However, the ocean temperature barely budged — even at totality.

On the other hand, the change in light intensity, which humans generally noticed about 15 to 20 minutes before totality, was more obvious to the deep-dwelling zooplankton earlier in the celestial event, Fram said.

“Light level changes quite a bit at depth,” he said. “If you change the surface light just a little bit, it gets noticeably darker to zooplankton.”

He added that his findings are consistent with similar research done during an eclipse in the early 1970s.

“That’s great,” he said. “That’s what we hoped to see.”

Astronomers and physicists capitalized on the total solar eclipse to gather data on the sun, but findings from the ocean were welcome, too.

“That might be my favorite story of the whole eclipse,” said Dan Seaton, a solar physicist at the University of Colorado who was not involved with the research. “It’s sort of adorable, this whole colony of tiny little creatures being like, ‘Oooh, nighttime!’ and then a few minutes later they’re like, ‘Oops.’

]]>[OOI in the News] LA Times – Will the Great American Eclipse make animals act strangely? Science says yeshttps://oceanobservatories.org/2017/08/ooi-in-the-news-la-times-will-the-great-american-eclipse-make-animals-act-strangely-science-says-yes/
Fri, 11 Aug 2017 20:45:39 +0000http://oceanobservatories.org/?p=13211

It’s not just humans who will be affected by the Great American Eclipse coming on Aug. 21 — expect animals to act strangely too.

Anecdotal evidence and a few scientific studies suggest that as the moon moves briefly between the sun and the Earth, causing a deep twilight to fall across the land, large swaths of the animal kingdom will alter their behavior.

Eclipse chasers say they have seen songbirds go quiet, large farm animals lie down, crickets start to chirp and chickens begin to roost.

[…]

But there is always more to learn, so it should come as no surprise that a few experiments to document animal behavior are in the works for the Great American Eclipse.

Jonathan Fram, an assistant professor at Oregon State University, plans to use a series of bio-acoustic sonars to see whether zooplankton in the path of totality will rise in the water column as the sun is obscured by the moon.

Across the ocean, an enormous number of animals hide in the deep, dark waters during the day, and then swim upward during the cover of night to take advantage of the food generated in the sunlit part of the ocean.

“It’s the biggest migration on the planet, and most of us don’t even know it is happening,” said Kelly Benoit-Bird, a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute who is not involved with Fram’s study.

Scientists have known for decades that changes in light can affect these animals’ migration patterns. For example, most of these deep-water migrants won’t swim as close to the surface as usual during a full moon. Still, a total eclipse provides an ideal natural experiment that can help researchers learn how important light cues are to different critters, Benoit-Bird said.

Fram, who works on a project known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative, will be able to get data from six bio-acoustic sonars off the Northwest coast — three that are directly in the path of totality and three that are not. This should allow researchers to see how much the sun has to dim to affect changes in the zooplankton’s movements.

“A lot of the powerful environmental events that happen in the oceans occur when we’re not there,” says Deborah Kelley, director of the OOI Cabled Array

Photo credit: UW; NSF-OOI; CSSF

There’s a lot going on below the ocean waves off the coast of Oregon and Washington—activity most of us would miss if it weren’t for the Ocean Observatories Initiative’s (OOI’s) Cabled Array. This research array, one of seven such arrays of sensors, instruments, and robotic vehicles that are part of the OOI, is the only one supplied with high power and Internet through telecommunications cables along the seafloor. The OOI, funded by the National Science Foundation and managed by the nonprofit Consortium for Ocean Leadership, is part of the U.S. contribution to the Global Ocean Observing System.

“A lot of the powerful environmental events that happen in the oceans occur when we’re not there,” says Deborah Kelley, a professor at the University of Washington’s (UW’s) School of Oceanography and director of the OOI Cabled Array. “We’re rarely in the right place at the right time to monitor and interact with all the evolving processes [that impact the ocean], which include big storms, underwater eruptions, and large earthquakes.”

John Delaney, another UW oceanography professor and a former OOI Cabled Array director, was the visionary for the array, an idea born around 15 to 20 years ago out of the school’s research on underwater volcanoes and hot springs about a mile below the ocean’s surface.

“We would go out there every year, if we were lucky, with a robotic vehicle or a three-person sub, and the landscape would be dramatically different and the animals would change,” Kelley explains. “Clearly, from year to year, things were going on, but we weren’t there to witness these changes and measure the environmental parameters that caused these changes.”

Providing power and Internet to the seafloor solves that issue, allowing for real-time monitoring as well as two-way communication between the operations center at UW and the instruments in the ocean. UW is one of four universities under contract to help manage and maintain various aspects of the OOI.

“We can interact 24 hours a day with the instruments out there, as things evolve,” Kelley says. “It’s a real game-changer in terms of understanding and monitoring, really being there with eyes and ears in the oceans 24 hours a day.”

All the data collected by both the Cabled Array and the six other OOI arrays are publicly available for researchers and anyone interested to use as they wish. Even those who have never been near the ocean can check out real-time video captured by the array’s cameras.

Along with being the only cabled research array in the OOI, the Cabled Array’s location is also part of what makes it unique. The section of seafloor it covers includes the Juan de Fuca Plate, a very active tectonic plate that’s easy to get to, giving researchers the ability to study volcanism at close range.

“It’s the world’s largest undersea volcanic observatory,” says Greg Ulses, OOI program director, about the Cabled Array. The other OOI arrays are located in the Gulf of Alaska, the Irminger Sea near Greenland, off the coast of New England, in the Argentine Basin, and in the Southern Ocean. The Endurance Array, also off the Oregon coast, complements the Cabled Array. OOI’s design and conception began about 10 years ago and it took around seven years to construct at a cost of roughly $300 million. It has been fully operational since only last year, Ulses says.

The sea floor split open on April 24, 2015, but scientists had seen it coming for months.

Drawing on data from more than a dozen instruments arrayed around the underwater volcano known as Axial Seamount, they documented telltale tremors that shook its slopes. They watched the caldera at the top of the volcano swell like a balloon filling with air, building up pressure until it finally burst. They couldn’t see much of the eruption that happened next — the water was too cloudy with debris — but they know that it involved plumes of super hot water and bubbles of gas and steam that popped with the explosive force of a mortar round. By the time the eruption ended a month later, nearly 88 billion gallons of molten rock had flooded ocean bottom.

A hollow pillow flow with a frozen tongue of lava spilling from the opening of the volcano rests atop glass-covered flows that formed during the 2015 eruption. (University of Washington/OOI-NSF/CSSF-ROPOS)

Axial Seamount is a half-mile-high volcano 300 miles from the Oregon coast, rising up from the Juan de Fuca Ridge where two tectonic plates are spreading apart. The 2015 eruption there was the third largest submarine eruption known to science. It offered researchers their best-ever glimpse into the workings of an undersea volcano, and a window onto the mid-ocean ridge that circles our planet like the seam on a baseball.

“We only know about a dozen eruptions on the sea floor,” said David Clague, a volcanologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. “Most of the world is not instrumented, and so they happen in solitude and no one knows. They are definitely the tree falling in the forest that no one hears.”

But after Axial Seamount erupted twice in the past decades — in 1998 and in 2011 — the National Science Foundation funded the installment of 550 miles of communications cable to and around the volcano. That cable powers some 130 sensors that measure the magma chamber, test the water column and monitor for earthquakes.

When the volcano erupted again in 2015, scientists got to watch the whole thing happen in real time, from the first tremor of activity to the moment when the last bit of lava hardened into rock. University of Washington oceanographer William Willcock, the lead author of one of the new studies on the eruption published this week in the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters, said these are “the most detailed observations ever made” of an undersea volcano. They may well be among the most detailed observations of any eruption on land too.

Chief among the findings from the project is that the floor of the seamount’s caldera drops during an eruption — in 2015 it fell by eight feet. Then, as gases and magma refill the chamber, it begins to inflate again. When it reaches a particular threshold, the volcano erupts. This is what allowed the observation team to predict that the seamount would erupt months before it actually happened.

Right after the 2015 eruption, Axial Seamount began to rapidly reinflate, then slowed. It’s gained almost half the height it lost in the eruption.

“Now we’ll just have to watch and see how fast it builds back up,” Oregon State oceanographer Bill Chadwick said in a statement (he was at sea when the results were announced this week). “We’ll be trying to forecast the next eruption again, but right now it’s a little early to tell.”

The observation team also found that seismometers at the site picked up an increasing number of earthquakes in the months leading up to the eruption — shortly before the event, there were thousands of tremors a day.

Though Axial Seamount is hundreds of miles from shore and a mile beneath the surface of the ocean, it is easier to study than most volcanoes on land. It’s extremely active, offering lots of chances to observe an eruption. It has a simple structure, and its caldera can be approached safely when it’s not active. The fact that it’s under water means that its interior can be probed with seismic waves, something that is much more difficult to do on land.

The data from the cabled array is part of NSF’s Ocean Observatories Initiative; after it’s collected it gets posted online and is available for anyone to use. The team hopes that it can help inform efforts to monitor land volcanoes and predict their eruptions, which usually aren’t recognized until a couple of weeks out.

“This is a great laboratory to study volcanic processes,” Clague said.

I think that for some people,” says Peter Girguis, a deep-sea microbial physiologist at Harvard University, “the ocean seems passé—that the days of Jacques Cousteau are behind us.” He begs to differ. Even though space exploration, he says, “seems like the ultimate adventure, every time we do a deep sea dive and discover something new and exciting, there’s this huge flurry of activity and interest on social media.” But the buzz soon fizzles out, perhaps because of ineffective media campaigns, he says. But “we’re also not doing a good job of explaining how important and frankly exciting ocean exploration is.”

That might change with the launch, this month, of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, an unprecedented network of oceanographic instruments in seven sites around the world. Each site features a suite of technologies at the surface, in the water column, and on the seafloor. Buoys, underwater cameras, autonomous vehicles, and hundreds of sensors per site will collect data on ocean temperature, salinity, chlorophyll levels, volcanic activity, and much more. Using this set of systems, oceanographers hope to address the limitations imposed by working on a ship or a single site for a limited period of time.

OCEAN EXPLORER: Peter Girguis thinks there is still much to be learned in the deep sea. Photo Credit: Rose Lincoln / Harvard News Office

“What that means is, in general, we’re very good at doing one of two things: studying the ocean spatially, such as studying the same process as you cross an ocean, or temporally, studying one point over time,” says Girguis, “But going back to about 20 years ago, scientists began to say, maybe there’s a way to do both of these better.”

Getting the Initiative off the ground (or, rather, in the water) has taken 10 years and $386 million, and the launch is only the beginning: Operational costs will comprise about a sixth of the National Science Foundation’s annual ocean sciences budget, and the ocean’s tendency to rust metals and fry wiring could lead to higher maintenance costs over time. With data now flowing, the questions that have followed the Initiative’s development are once again bobbing to the surface: Will it work? Will it be useful? And will the millions of dollars that taxpayers have provided be worth their investment?

We sat down with Girguis to talk about the worth of the Ocean Observatories Initiative and its place in modern marine science.

Why haven’t there been many large-scale commitments to ocean science, like this initiative, in recent years?

When they landed a spacecraft on the moon, all they had to do to keep the astronauts at one atmosphere was design a spacecraft that could tolerate one atmosphere of pressure. Outside of the ship it’s simply zero atmospheres—that’s a difference of one. When we dive in the submersible Alvin, routinely, to go to our study sights, Alvin has to withstand 250-300 atmospheres. And the ocean is a harsh environment. Alvin has to battle corrosion, electrical shorts; we have to keep from getting stuck on deep sea corals; and around vents, we have to keep from having the plastic windows—which, yes, they are plastic—from melting in water coming out that’s 300 degrees Celsius.

The fact that this seems routine to us scientists is a tribute to the engineers that make it happen. But the fact that the public thinks it is routine means we scientists should be doing a better job of explaining the adventure of it, and also the deep and profound importance that our ocean has in keeping our planet healthy.

Does having the Ocean Observatories Initiative arrays in only seven places limit what they can tell us about the ocean?

This project is by no means comprehensive. I don’t think anybody would say we are comprehensively studying the ocean. That does not mean that it is meaningless. We have, as a community, tried to judiciously pick sites that could tell us something about the other areas of the ocean. Think of them as good representatives of wider-spread environments.

Additionally, those arrays are, to a degree, moveable assets. They are essentially giant moorings, which in some point in the future could be picked up and moved to another locale. But these seven sites are chosen because they’re good representations of important regions of the ocean—not only for natural scientists but also for applied scientists, like those trying to understand fisheries and fish stocks, and how the ocean responds to humans.

How can researchers use the Initiative’s data in their work?

One example: By co-localizing these sensors, researchers can help monitor when phytoplankton—which make, by the way, half the oxygen you breathe—bloom, and grow to huge numbers. When they do that, it’s not always clear what causes it. By having sensors and samplers co-located, you can start to make correlations that help you identify a cause. And I chose that phrase carefully: Correlations are easy to come by, but it’s only when you have a really good data set that you can really move from a correlation to a cause.

How will the array aid in your research?

I work primarily in the deep sea, at the hydrothermal vents in the Northeastern Pacific off the coast of Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver. By deep sea, I mean the part of the ocean that is perpetually dark, which is 80 percent of our planet’s habitable space. What happens in the deep sea is very much influenced by what happens in the surface waters, because that’s where most of the food in the deep sea comes from. Conversely, we now finally have the data to support some long-standing questions and ideas we had about how processes in the deep sea influence what happens on the surface.

Hydrothermal vents, for example, are a major ocean source of iron and trace minerals. They’re kind of like the ocean’s multivitamin. You don’t need a lot of this stuff, in the same way were not guzzling pounds of iron, but you need just enough to stay healthy. And that’s what hydrothermal vents provide. By studying the processes on the surface, and concurrently studying processes in the deep sea, we can start understanding the ocean as a system, and not as a bunch of compartmentalized ecosystems. I’m excited about using the observatories to look at the linkages among all of these processes—biological, chemical, and physical.

Are you concerned that the high price of the project will lead to fewer exploratory projects?

That is a really big question now. I think scientists owe it to the taxpayers to make best use of these assets, and best use of the money, and to provide an explanation for the value of our work. But the Ocean Observatories Initiative has the potential to bring together different federal and non-government agencies to look at the relationships that we have not previously considered. So, a hypothetical example—as the ocean’s multivitamin, hydrothermal vents could stimulate phytoplankton in the Northeast pacific. How does that influence commercial fisheries, like salmon or tuna? That’s a question nobody really knows the answer to. And it could bring interest from agencies outside of the National Science Foundation, like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Geologic Survey, the Environmental Protection Agency, even commercial fisheries.

Expand it even further—Google is always interested in providing real-time information on traffic. It’s not unreasonable that commercial entities could make use of some of these systems, to provide information for commercial operations. The question should not be limited to what we can do with our current sensors, but rather: What is it that we’re not doing yet that would change the way we think about our oceans? And, how do we develop the tools and methods to change that? So it’s my hope that the observatories expand well beyond the scope of the National Science Foundation, and well beyond their sole dependence for support.

An Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) inshore surface mooring is deployed in June 2015 off the coast of Newport, Oreg., from Oregon State University’s (OSU) R/V Pacific Storm. In the background, a team on OSU’s R/V Elakha is deploying an OOI underwater glider. Photo Credit: Andy Cripe, Corvallis Gazette-Times

The coastal ocean provides critical services that yield both ecological and economic benefits. Its dynamic nature, however, makes it a most challenging environment to study. Recently, a better understanding of the coupled physical, chemical, geological, and biological processes that characterize the coastal ocean became more attainable.

Ocean Observatories Initiative systems were fully commissioned as of the end of 2015.

Last January, the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), a program of the National Science Foundation (NSF), held a workshop in Washington, D. C., to acquaint potential users with the capabilities offered by the OOI systems, which were fully commissioned as of the end of 2015. A future workshop is planned for this fall on the West Coast.

OOI maintains two coastal ocean arrays: the Pioneer Array in the northwest Atlantic and the Endurance Array in the northeast Pacific. Each has a series of fixed moorings spanning the continental shelf, as well as mobile assets—underwater gliders and propeller-driven autonomous underwater vehicles.

Together, these observatories are capable of resolving coastal ocean processes across a range of temporal and spatial scales. Such data are critical for understanding nutrient and carbon cycling, controls on the abundance of marine organisms, and the effects of long-term warming and extreme weather events.

At the workshop, Jack Barth (Oregon State University) and Glen Gawarkiewicz (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) presented preliminary results of recent studies and data collection efforts, stressing the rapid, ongoing changes in coastal ocean temperatures in the U.S. West and East Coast shelf and slope systems. Other participants discussed connections between physics and water column nutrients, the temporal variability of key shelf currents, and the role of OOI data in assessing biodiversity.

A key outcome of the workshop was the introduction of the OOI data portal, where participants acquired firsthand experience in data querying, plotting, and downloading of OOI data. Additionally, participants had numerous opportunities to provide feedback to the OOI Cyber Infrastructure Team.

Anyone can sign up for an account to gain access to OOI data. These data are now available for plotting on the OOI data portal, and select data streams are also available. These sites will be updated with additional data and downloading formats as they become available.

OOI has entered a new phase of community engagement where scientists and educators are encouraged to use the data, provide feedback on data access ease and quality, and, in the process, expand our understanding of coastal oceans.

NSF program managers from all relevant disciplines expressed their support for the arrays. Additionally, we learned the details of how to submit proposals related to OOI data, and all the proposal submission information is available on the OOI website. Workshop participants also learned about the OOI education portal, which can bring cutting-edge ocean data and ocean science concepts to classrooms and informal science education sites.
The message from NSF was clear—OOI has entered a new phase of community engagement where scientists and educators are encouraged to use these data, provide feedback on data access ease and quality, and, in the process, expand our understanding of coastal oceans. A new era is approaching in which integrated ocean observatories will help stimulate innovative science and educational partnerships at the same time they enhance our ability to understand the changes occurring in our coastal oceans.

Jack Barth and Chris Edwards contributed to the writing of this summary. We thank NSF for sponsoring this workshop and the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System for organizing the event, with a special thanks to Larry Atkinson and Annette DeSilva for their efforts. We also thank the workshop participants and the OOI Cyber Infrastructure Team for their continued work.